Fake News: The iOS Game

A team of us at ISL created this iOS based game — it's like Tinder, for democracy. The game lets you guess whether a new story is true or false, and checks your sources at the end of the game.

Fake News: The Game

Visual QA

A team of us at ISL built Fake News!, the iOS app-based game, to highlight how easy it is for any of us to get tripped up by false news stories. My role on this project was as the lead designer, working closely with our development team and creative direction to create a fun-to-use, fun-to-look-at app.

"Fake news is a real problem. Recently, the Pew Research Center found that about two thirds of U.S. adults say completely made-up news causes a great deal of confusion about current events. So we built Fake News!, a simple game to test our collective ability to distinguish between what's true, and what's just been tweeted."

We created wireframes and a functional prototype to test the game's functionality before moving into visual design.

Type treatments have a stippled effect to add depth and texture without leaving the 8-bit, retro-game world.

We styled the game like a retro arcade game, referencing 8-bit video games, to give the game a lighthearted feel while covering what can be a pretty serious, often depressing subject. Additionally, for our mostly millennial audience, the 90s 8 bit style evokes nostalgic memories of childhood arcade games, which is a great feeling to nurture while teaching something new with the content. We also incorporated beloved elements of 90s video games, like a leaderboard, to add an incentive for people to play multiple times (and the top news sleuths worldwide are listed on our website).

A map of the screens during visual design

Taylor, the lead developer, and myself doing visual QA on multiple screen sizes

Taylor, doing his thing

A screencast of the app in action

The game also had a custom-built enclosure for its incarnation as a bar game, built by Zach Saale